REBORN: ENTER INTO THE APOCALYPSE

CHAPTER THREE - Already Late

Ray's phone rang on Thursday at 5:00 am.

He was already awake and had been sitting at the kitchen table with a notepad in front trying to build every list of names he knew would be connected to project X.

The list had not been bulky, it only had three different names.

He quickly grabbed the phone after ringing the second time.

“Hello Ray,.” It wasn't Dani's voice, it was her room mate, Sara, her voice was hurried and abnormal.

“Something has happened to Dani, she's…. I don't actually know what's wrong with her , she has these whitish substances all over her mouth and she scares me, her face looks…” Sara suddenly stopped. “Ray, her face was not normal.”

Ray was already on his feet. “Don't touch her, don't allow anybody to come inside that room, I'm on my way now.”

He was out of the room like a flash, he ran for almost five miles.

Whatever the future version of himself had carried it had started coming to reality now.

He didn't even think, he kept running and kept his phone glued to his ears as Sara kept describing his sister. His stomach dropped lower as he approached every block.

Black lines under the skin, starting from the jaw with her eyes moving under closed lids, a kind of putrid odour Sara can't identify.

Ray knew immediately what it was.

He had seen it on his mother's face in the hospital and had watched all these Sara described happen to her in the hospital.

Those black lines even came before the eyes changed color and there was maybe two to three hours before Dani would turn fully.

But these made no sense.

Project X had not even begun yet and his mother had not yet been admitted, the experiment had not even happened, it couldn't have started yet.

Unless he was actually wrong, maybe it had started earlier than he had thought.

He reached his sister's apartment at a full speed and headed towards Dani's room after taking the stairs.

Sara was outside the apartment door, with her arms wrapped around herself and her face looking pale.

“She's inside the room, Ray, she started shaking terribly about an hour ago and I…”

Ray went past her and flung the door open before she could even complete her statement.

Dani was on her bed. On her back, her eyes were tightly shut, they were completely still except for the sudden rise and fall of her chest.

And across her face,  from her jawline up both cheeks were black thin lines, which branched slowly the way cracks spread across dry ground.

Ray sat on the edge of the bed and grabbed her hand. It was warm and a little pulse was present. He pressed two fingers on her neck and observed. It was fast,  very fast.

"Dani." He squeezed her hand hard. "Dani, open your eyes right now."

No answer.

"Dani."

Her hand twitched in his.

He leaned down close to her face. Her breathing was shallow and rapid and when he pulled her eyelid back with his thumb her eye was still white, not red, which meant there was still time but he did not know how much.

He pulled out his phone and called the only number he had.

St Emmanuel emergency line.

It took eleven minutes before the ambulance arrived. Ray was still in Dani's room and held her hand and looked at her face and had counted seconds between each breath and prayed for time to move faster.

Sara stood in the doorway. "What is that on her face? Ray, what is that?"

Ray did not give her an immediate answer but he asked instead

“Has anybody come to look for her in the past few days?”

“No, not that I could remember.” She said, shaking her head. 

"Go wait outside," Ray said suddenly.

"But…"

"Sara. Go outside right now."

She left.

Ray stared at his sister and felt the full weight of what he was holding. He had come back one week earlier for the sole purpose of stopping this. 

He had changed the route to Anders’. He had called Dani and told her to stay home. He had sat up two nights running and trying to build up a plan.

None of it had really mattered.

Dani was lying in front of him with signs of Project X all over her face and the apocalypse hadn't even officially begun yet. 

He had been so focused on the hospital, on Wolfe and on the consent form, that he had never once asked the real question.

How did it start the first time?

He thought his mother was Patient Zero. He had assumed that from the beginning because she was the one in the theater, she was the one who turned first in front of him. 

But what if she wasn't the first? What if someone else was infected before her and he had never known because he was unconscious on a corridor floor for three days?

What if Dani had always been first?

The paramedics arrived and Ray stepped back and let them work and stood against the wall and watched and said nothing about the lines on her face because he didn't know what they would do if he told them and he couldn't risk losing access to her.

They took her to St Emmanuel.

Ray rode in the ambulance and held her hand the whole way and did not let go once.

At the hospital Dr Arnold was on shift. Ray recognised him immediately. It was the same doctor he had met the day his mother was admitted with the same tired eyes, same calm voice, same man who had delivered his mother's diagnosis the first time around.

But this time it wasn't his mother, it was his sister. 

Arnold took a look at Dani fast and came out of the room and looked at Ray with an expression Ray could not fully read.

"Has she been in any close contact with any government medical research programs recently?" Arnold asked. "Any trials, any experimental treatments?"

Ray's body suddenly went cold. "Why all these questions?"

Arnold lowered his voice. "What's showing on her skin…I've seen something documented like this before. In one case, a few weeks ago, with an internal memo, it was flagged as a failure and immediately buried.”

He looked both ways down the corridor. "Ray, your sister needs to be moved out of this hospital right now. There are people who will come when they see these readings on her chart and you do not want…"

His phone suddenly rang in his pocket.

He grabbed it immediately and stared at the screen, it was his mom, he quickly picked it.

"Raymond.” it wasn't his mother's voice it was their next door neighbor Mrs Linda.

“The ambulance is here," Mrs Linda said. "Your mama collapsed baby, she's on the floor, her face …Raymond her face has those black lines…"

Confused, Ray stood still for a brief moment as everything happened so fast, he hadn't anticipated his mother's condition getting worse so quickly.

But it seems today wasn't his lucky day.

He had been wrong all along.

******

Ray stood at the corridor of St Emmanuel hospital with his sister behind one door and his mother arriving through the front entrance and Dr. Arnold staring at him.

He understood fully, completely, and finally that he had not come back early enough.

Both of them.

At the same time.

He relaxed his back against the wall and closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he opened them and walked straight to the nurses.

"I need to speak to whoever runs Project X in this hospital. Right now!. Tell them Ray Parker is here and he wants to volunteer."

Arnold pulled him aside. "Ray you don't know what you're…"

"I know exactly what I'm doing," Ray said. "Get them all here."

He had one move left. If Project X could be reversed engineered into him and it worked, there would be a chance. One single chance, that whatever they built inside him could be extracted and used to pull Dani and his mother back before they turned completely.

It was the same deal as before.

Except this time Ray was the one who walked into it on his own terms.

He stood at the nurses station and waited and somewhere behind him the front entrance doors opened and paramedics wheeled his mother through.

He did not turn around because if he saw her face right now he would not be able to keep standing.

He stood still and pressed his hands towards his face in disgust.

Suddenly the elevator at the end of the corridor opened.

A muscular man in his early thirties stepped out in black suit and a dark eyeglass, two fierce looking guards like the ones Ray had seen before stood behind him.

It was Wolfe.

He stared at Ray across the hallway and stopped in front of him. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a document and held it up.

It was a Consent form, it was already printed and prepared.

And Ray's name was already at the top.